


The Last Rules

by V_Haley



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-10
Updated: 2011-05-10
Packaged: 2017-10-19 05:52:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/197647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/V_Haley/pseuds/V_Haley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The differences between male and female immortals.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Last Rules

Immortals are an odd breed of human, similar to mortals but of necessity different.  What most people--mortal and male Immortal alike--never stop to consider is that female Immortals are as different from men as mortals are from us.  We are often lumped together, but the fundamental truth is we differ radically.  We have different lives and different experiences.  Even different rules.

The first rule, the most important, the one that frames all others, is that in the end, there can be only one.  At some point, we must all fight, and all but one must die.  As we still live, we will live and die by our rules.

The second rule, the one that qualifies the first, is that all fights must be fought one person against one person.  There is one winner, one Quickening; remember this: there can be only one, because it is something that we--all of us--can never forget.  But not on holy ground, and that is the third rule.  Holy ground is sacrosanct.  We do not fight; we do not kill.

The last two rules are ours alone: you must not tell them; you must not keep them.  These are the women's rules.

There are fewer of us.  We are physically weaker than men, and we are trained less often to fight.  We have a high mortality rate, especially in our first century.  Which is why, for all our hatred and occasional vendettas, there is a solidarity among female Immortals.  We know.

It is a grand mystery where Immortals "come from."  Who are we born to?  Sometimes I want to shake every person who has ever asked that in front of me and demand of him, "What do you think, fool?  Where _all_ men come from."  But they would not believe, and we would not want them to.

Immortals are a long-lived race.  Our birthrate is very low in the first place.  We simply should not need to replenish our numbers that quickly.  In addition to that, conception is almost nonexistent as the female immune system attacks sperm as soon as it enters the body.  It is hard to get pregnant and harder still to stay pregnant, since Immortal fetuses abort more often that not.  Part of that is natural, I think, but most of it is because if a mother takes a Quickening, the baby dies.  No second chances.  While this is only a risk in the first five months of the three year gestation period, it happens far more often than not.  There have even been a few rare instances where Immortal women have accidentally taken Quickenings later in the pregnancies.  Fortunately, such abortions are almost unheard of, since they tend to kill the mother with the child half the time.  No surprise, really, because at that point, the women is no longer Immortal.

Oh, the loss of Immortality does not last _forever_.  The Quickening simply turns inward, focusing on the child.  In that time, the mother ages.  She can be killed.  No few are, in childbirth.  (Which greatly decimates the already lower number of female Immortals.)  But while a woman is pregnant, she is "safe," at least from Immortals.  She no longer has the telling signs of her Immortality: no warning, no healing, no immunity to death.

Most of us hate it.  We are vulnerable to life far more so than we ever are to a man's sword.  Life is fickle.  There are diseases; accidents.  We are not used to living with mortality.  So many of us die during that time that most Immortal women will do anything to avoid it.  Some refuse to willingly sleep with Immortal men; some bet on our immune systems.  (Mortal men, at least, are safe.  Mortal and Immortal, our two species are sterile together.)  Honestly, what woman would want to be pregnant?  Not once she passes her first century or her first pregnancy.  The idea sounds appealing to most of us, at first.  For the most part, with few exceptions, we were raised to be wives and mothers.  We *want* children, but not once we learn the consequences.  There are always consequences.

Men have a vested interest in believing all Immortals are sterile.  Who would want to live with the knowledge that you must one day fight and kill your child?  (How many women have gone mad from that knowledge?)  More, why should they believe us?  Women are "weak;" we will say and do anything to avoid being killed.  Even "lie" about being pregnant.

Still, most men would choose to know, I think.  Women, however, have a far stronger interest in keeping it a secret.  Who among us wants to be turned into a child farm for men who think they need children so badly?  Or men who would conceive a child only to kill it for its Quickening?  To be bred and bred and bred until we die of old age or birth?  Who among us can afford to keep and care for a child when, after birth, our Immortality and the hunters return.  We cannot even risk _keeping_ our children, knowing we must fight them and knowing they may get us killed.

Granted, some of us try to raise them, and some of us stay close, but for most of us, the pain and the risk is just too great.  It is better not to know whether the man raping you with a sword at your throat is your son.

So we endure it--endure the loss, the pain, and the secrecy--because that is what we do.  It's what we are good at.  We _live_ , we survive, we mourn.  What else can we do?  Except pass the knowledge--woman to woman, teacher to student--and weep, because we may bend and break the first two rules, but the last three are sacrosanct.  Above all else--above woman, daughter, lover, teacher, student, and survivor--we are Immortal, and there can be only one.

**Author's Note:**

> Written 1/30/2003


End file.
